Billboard advertising "Ecstasy," a 1933 film starring Hedy Lamarr that became notorious as the first Hollywood movie depicting a female orgasm (Wikipedia)
Here and for the next few posts, I initiate an extended Valentines Day card to all Brainstorm readers, but especially the women. What better topic, à propos romance, than female orgasm?
I am much taken with scientific mysteries, evolutionary ones most especially: those phenomena that we cannot (yet) explain, but someday presumably will. I’ve written earlier about some of these, notably the mystery of why women, alone among mammals, possess extensive breast tissue even when not nursing, as well as why ovulation is concealed in our species. The next mystery is simply this: Why does female orgasm exist?
There is a Spanish expression, “Hay que gozar mucho para desquitarse de la vida” (“You need to have a lot of fun to get even with life”). Life throws us a lot of curve balls, making it tempting to conclude that some of the good stuff, like orgasms, are simply there to make up for it. Whether or not you agree, it simply isn’t enough to say that female orgasm exists because it is great fun, a way of getting even with life, or a gift from a benevolent God along with a delightfully cooperating personal physiology, either self-administered or with an assist from a satisfying partner.
Not so fast, however.
There is no doubt that orgasm feels good. Think of Meg Ryan’s famous simulated orgasm-in-the-restaurant scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally (after which a middle-aged diner says to the waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”). My point is simply that the real thing cannot merely be written off as good fortune or a surprising culinary consequence of choosing the right menu item while having a meal with Billy Crystal. Nowhere in the biological world is pleasure bestowed cheaply or randomly or out of mere cosmic generosity.
When asked, many women say that orgasm is a great tension reliever. True enough, but this doesn’t mean that tension relief is the underlying evolutionary reason for orgasm, since if sexual tension hadn’t accumulated in the first place, it wouldn’t have needed releasing. And besides why do it in a way that requires so many situational prerequisites?
The reality is that female orgasm is a contentious, unsolved mystery among evolutionary biologists, simply because its adaptive significance—its biological payoff—is obscure. Events on the male side pretty much speak for themselves. Even though orgasm (a subjectively experienced phenomenon) is technically different from ejaculation (expulsion of semen from the body), it occasions no great surprise that for men the two are tightly connected, and that natural selection has doubtless contrived to use the former as a carrot, inducing men to engage in the latter. But what about women?
Of course, not all women experience orgasm, and that is part of the mystery, although not as one might think: The enigma of female orgasm is not why some women don’t climax but why some do. The data are quite clear that unlike its male counterpart, female orgasm isn’t necessary for reproduction; among the many complaints of nonorgasmic women, inability to conceive is not one.
For generations, old and young wives’ tales—and husbands’, too, along with scores of Victorian romance novels—claimed that there was some sort of connection between a woman “really giving” herself and finally becoming pregnant. And to be sure, it is easy to speculate how female orgasm might facilitate fertilization, especially if the waves of muscular contraction provide greater access of sperm to egg. The problem, however, is that most of these contractions go in the wrong direction! It has alternatively been claimed that uterine contractions during orgasm literally generate a suction effect, which draws semen up toward the fallopian tubes.
There may yet be some truth to this rather inelegantly named “uterine upsuck” hypothesis, which was generated by heroic laboratory research in which a radio telemetry device was inserted into a uterus during its owner’s sexual arousal, thereby revealing a vacuum cleaner–like negative pressure following orgasm. This “finding,” however, was based on an unacceptably small sample size: one woman!
Moreover, even if uterine upsuck turns out to be a valid phenomenon, it is far from what scientists call a “robust” one, or else it would have been noted previously. More to the point, it would have generated a cause-and-effect relationship between female orgasm and subsequent pregnancy, which simply does not exist. It has also been suggested—although again, the data are at best inconclusive—that orgasm reduces the amount of “flow-back” (the leakage of semen out of a woman’s reproductive tract), thereby increasing the likelihood that fertilization will be achieved by a partner who may have helped induce that orgasm. But this, too, is controversial, based on a very small sample of remarkably cooperative couples.
Although there are, in theory, many ways by which female orgasm could facilitate fertilization (including a range of possible biochemical effects along with physical assistance to sperm or egg), there is currently no evidence that orgasmic women produce more babies, or better ones, than their less fortunate “sisters.” And of course, in vitro fertilization further italicizes that when it comes to baby making, female orgasm is simply not a physiologic or anatomic prerequisite.
On the other hand, female orgasms are unquestionably real and are, if anything, more dramatic than their male counterparts, especially given a woman’s capacity for multiple orgasms. Given that there are no free lunches in biology, the question presents itself: Why orgasm?
To be continued. Next time: some easy-to-exclude hypotheses.
